HDD by stefan @ 2011-01-31
The 500GB Scorpio Black 2.5'' HDD from Western Digital maintains the performance lead ahead of many similar drives on the market with the same capacity. Being available on the market for about 55 Euros, it goes head to head with the Hitachi 7K500-500 model, outperforming it in some cases.
At first I would like to thank Western Digital for offering me a sample of their Scorpio Black 2.5'' 500GB HDD for review.
"Western Digital is one of the world’s largest makers of data storage products – a data storage pioneer providing cost-effective storage solutions for people and organizations that collect, manage and use digital information.
WD is a global leader in the development and manufacture of hard drives and solid state drives for internal, external, portable and shared storage applications. WD hard drives are used in desktop and notebook computers, mobile devices, corporate networks and home entertainment equipment. WD solid-state drives are used in embedded applications such as network communications, industrial, medical, military and aerospace markets.
WD was founded in 1970 and began designing and manufacturing hard drives in 1988. Its storage products are marketed to leading OEMs, systems manufacturers, select resellers and retailers under the Western Digital and WD brand names. From its headquarters in Irvine, California, the company employs about 63,000 people worldwide at manufacturing facilities in California, Malaysia and Thailand; design facilities in Southern and Northern California, Colorado and Thailand; and sales offices around the world.
Products
WD serves desktop computer users with a wide range of 3.5-inch WD Caviar hard drives in both EIDE and Serial ATA interfaces for PC and Macintosh® computers. All feature cool, quiet, power-conserving operation.
A large family of 2.5-inch WD Scorpio hard drives is offered for notebook computing, also featuring high performance and low power consumption.
WD's enterprise storage offerings, including WD S25, WD RE and WD VelociRaptor lines, deliver the high performance, reliability and capacity required for servers, network attached storage devices, storage area networks, workstations, RAID servers, medical imaging, gaming and video/broadcast applications.
The company’s family of WD AV drives provides quiet, high-capacity, power-efficient video-streaming for users of digital video recorders and other home entertainment products.
WD external hard drives and storage appliances employ all the popular interfaces for network storage and direct attachment to computers. They are ideal for data backup, extra storage and offer plug-and-play convenience as well as the ultimate in pocket-sized portability of massive amounts of digital data.
WD’s family of SiliconDrive solid-state storage products, now in its third generation, offers a wide variety of capacities and interface options for superior performance and low total cost of operation. Uses range from the most sophisticated and demanding medical, military and aerospace installations to read-only applications in gaming.
WD enables content stored on hard drives to be more easily enjoyed with its entertainment products, including its DVR expanders and WD TV media players."
Desktop-class performance
With 7200 RPM spin speed, 16 MB cache, and capacities up to 750 GB, these drives enable you to have the best of both worlds: the capacity and performance of a desktop PC with the convenience and portability of a notebook.
Massive capacity
WD’s 500 GB 2.5-inch drives offer huge capacity for space-hungry operating systems with plenty of room left over for photos, music, and video.
Low power consumption
With technologies like IntelliSeek™ which calculates optimum seek speeds to lower power consumption and SecurePark™ which reduces power by parking the heads during low power idle mode, this drive delivers 5400 RPM equivalent power consumption in a 7200 RPM drive.
Quiet
In a notebook drive, silence is golden. WD’s exclusive WhisperDrive™ combines state-of-the-art seeking algorithms to yield one of the quietest 2.5-inch hard drives on the market.
Reliable and rugged
WD’s ShockGuard™ technology protects the drive mechanics and platter surfaces from shocks during shipping, handling, and daily operation. WD’s SecurePark parks the recording heads off the disk surface during spin up, spin down, and when the drive is off. This ensures the recording head never touches the disk surface, resulting in improved long-term reliability due to less head wear and improved shock tolerance.
Compatible
We perform tests on hundreds ofsystems and a multitude of platforms in our FIT Lab™ and Mobile Compatibility Lab to give WD customers confidence that our drives will work in their systems.
The Western Digital Scorpio Black 2.5'' 500GB HDD ships in a small cardboard box, fixed inside a protective plastic shell:
After the removal of the drive from the sealed anti-static bag (which also had inside a sachet of desiccants to keep a state of dryness inside the bag), we can reveal the drive which has lots of information revealed on top (the drive appearance is the same as the previous 320GB model); here we can see written the full HDD capacity, its code name, the serial number, the manufacturing date, power rating, or the logos of supported standards. On the bottom we can find the Scorpio Black logo:
A small breather hole can be also found on the top side, that must not be covered, while the drive is operating:
On the back side of the HDD, we can find the green PCB, with no components mounted on this side:
The drive is designed with 4 pins; by using a jumper we can enable different drive functions like Spread Spectrum Clocking (SSC) or Reduced Power Spinup (RPS):
Near the pins we can also find the SATA Data and Power ports:
CPU : Intel I7 920 Retail @ 3.2GHz
Motherboard : Asrock X58 Extreme
RAM : G.Skill F3-12800CL8T-6GBPI PI Series
Video : Sparkle Calibre X460G 1GB GDDR5
Power Supply : Antec True Power New 750W
HDD : Seagate Barracuda 320GB 7200.10
With the help of AIDA64, we can extract more information regarding the drive:
The drive comes unformatted and after we format it with NTFS, we can see the total remaining disk space:
In the performed tests, the Scorpio Black 500GB 2.5'' HDD from Western Digital performed faster than the 320GB version; in most benchmarks it was very close to the Hitachi 7K500-500, but there were also situations when it outperformed it with ease.
The Scorpio Black 500GB model continues to be one of the fastest 500GB 2.5'' HDDs on the market, that we should not pass up when considering buying a new drive for our laptop. This model does also come with a nice five-year warranty, compared to the Scorpio Blue that only has three.
The drive is priced about the same as the Hitachi model, 55 Euros. For about double the price, we can look upon the recently launched Scorpio Black 750GB model. This one adopts a newer standard named Advanced Format, replacing the traditional 512 byte hard drive sector with a 4 kilobyte (4,096B) hard drive sector. Also, the drive comes with two 375GB platters, opposed to the 500GB version, which has two 250GB platters.
Overall you'll be hard pressed to find a faster laptop HDD on the market today, while it's a dying segment with SSD drives prices plummeting and size increasing, these HDDs still offer a premium price/GB ratio which is not easy to neglect.
I would like to thank again to Western Digital for allowing to test their latest products!